[Coda]

This thread hasn't seen love in a long time. Let's fix that.

I threw a birthday party for my son yesterday -- his 16th birthday. It went very well!

The week leading up to it was a roller coaster. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I was feeling more awake than I have in a long time. I was able to work on preparations without a problem. And my wife was doing well, too; she spent more time doing creative stuff this week than she had in a long time, making invitations and party favors. But Thursday and Friday, our energy tanked. We were cranky and irritable and didn't get as much done as we wanted. But Friday night, both my parents and her parents showed up and helped us get everything done. Our house hasn't looked better since we moved into it!

My son wanted a Legend of Zelda theme for the party. Something about using Inkscape clicked for me so I was able to trace out some vector graphics to send to my paper cutter, so we reproduced the Purah Pad by layering different colors of paper cutouts and used heat-reactive foil on translucent vellum to put the invitation details on the screen. We got some decorations from Amazon. And then we made some party favors -- glowing fairies in jars, stone-textured goddess statues, and bomb mini-pinatas so each kid could have one of their own to throw down and explode with candy and confetti.

Three of his friends from school showed up, one with a little sister in tow, and three more kids that are very close family friends came from out of town. We gave the kids free rein over the basement where we had set out all of our video games, and the adults sat around upstairs to socialize. Everyone had a great time.

This was a huge success, and a big positive right when I think we really needed one the most.